A Shroud of Fog
by Memphis Lupine
Summary: [comicverse one-shot] It's 1974 in England, and Hellboy is having a bad night; an easily spooked woman, the ghost of her dead son, and a fog outside a dark window are effectively why.


**Notes: **http: // www. livejournal. com/ users/ memlu/ 85055. html   [--remove spaces]

**Disclaimer:  **Hellboy and B.P.R.D. are the creations and property of Mike Mignola.  Fic inspired by the short story 'The Shroud,' from Grimm's Household Tales.

**Feedback:**  Definitely welcomed.

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A Shroud of Fog:

a one-shot

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_England__, 1974.___

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      Dusk was spreading thick and black across the dipping, swelling hills of the countryside, inky enough to quickly dim the sunlight still feebly pressing up from the uneven horizon line.  Light was present, though weak, and Hellboy paused in that vainly persisting glow to look almost skeptically at the spotlessly clean and white-washed house before him.  The windows on both floors were dark save for a solemn trio of candles in the one nearest the door; the impressive sheer white of the house itself served as light enough, nestled as it was in the spurred shadows of a small copse of trees, and pale as though to shine.

      Stepping onto the carefully painted stone path leading the ten feet from dusty road to ghostly house, he crossed easily to the door, a dark red and intimidating bulky figure in the surrounding shadows.  He hunched, slightly, to fit his head in the shallow alcove created by a small 'roof' fixed over the door; and, perhaps, he did so in a well-meant attempt to appear less threatening, and more pleasant, congenial.  He knew better, but what the hell – it couldn't hurt anyone.

      He lifted his left hand, rapping as gently as he could against the door with the large knuckles and waiting patiently beneath the tiny roof.  The sky continued to slowly descend into new-moon darkness.  

      "Aw, jeez," he muttered as a minute finished its passing.  "I know I'm in the right place."  Another minute slipped resolutely by and eh shifted, careful not to bump his head or nubbed horns against the eaves of the sheltering roof-let.  "Miss Allister?  Are you home?  I'm from the B.P.R.D."  He knocked again, and listened sharply for any quick footsteps or voices raised in response.  "Miss Allister," he tried a second time.

      At this, now, came the hurried sound of light feet crossing a polished floor, and a faint, "Do wait!  I'm nearly there.  Oh, I'm nearly at the door right now, so please just wait another moment."  The footsteps ceased at the door, as, too, did the voice.

      "Miss Allister?" he suggested faintly.  "Could you open the door, ma'am?"

      "Oh, yes," she replied, voice distant on the other side of the thick wood.  "Only it's that I must remember what order to open the locks."  A beat of flustered silence, and then a tiny triumphant click, followed by a distinctly relieved assurance of, "I've got it now, though; it'll be one more moment, if you don't find it a bother."

      "No bother at all, ma'am," Hellboy answered, per the unspoken rules of civility.  No sense in being impatient with a girl frightened enough to forgot how to unlock her own front door.

      "Ah," she sighed, again in relief, and twisted a final lock with a satisfied click.  "That's all there is to it."  The doorknob shifted, and turned, the door itself swinging in smoothly in silent, dreadful welcome.  "I do wish you had shown while it was still daylight outside," she began, worried.  "The nights are the worst, and I couldn't bear imagining what should happen if I opened my house to the nighttime and let in a—oh."

      She took a step back, out of a nervous shock that was clear on her sallow face, and a slender hand darted to her mouth out of the same anxious horror.  Miss Allister was a petite woman, small-set and young though her shoulders were carried slumped with a paranoid weariness.  Equally small brown eyes stared, wide and blank, at Hellboy's naturally, and fittingly, demonic features, before she schooled the rest of her body language into the same careful blankness.

      "Oh," she said again.  "You aren't exactly," she hesitated, letting the sentence hang awkwardly – normal, human, familiar, any combination of the three.  Instead, she finished, wavering only once, "You aren't exactly what I had expected."

      Hellboy smiled thinly, humorlessly but not in an offended manner.  "Nothing to worry about," he said, placing his left hand on the doorframe.  "I get that a lot.  Hellboy, courtesy the B.P.R.D. – you got a haunting that needs to be dealt with?"

      Miss Allister looked away from his bright red hand, still appearing shaken, and perhaps a bit wary.  "Yes," she answered.  "And it comes at night."

      He stepped into the house, where the ceiling hung low above his head, and Hellboy slouched, slightly, to keep from bumping against the sleek, polished underbelly of the above floor.  He glanced to the side as Miss Allister silently, methodically, began fixing the locks back into place at the door; he stepped forward with a soft creaking underfoot, to give her room enough to easily finished her mechanical chore and, too, to allow her a moment to calm her startled and wary nerves.

      What light filled the small and narrow house was provided by large and frequent gatherings of candles, yellow flickers nearly motionless in the still air and light reflecting as hazy gold along the floorboards.  He took another step forward, looked briefly – with some wryness – at the down-turned light switch, and then again to the steady candlelight.

      A last, reluctant click took his attention from surveying the dark hallway to the woman now nervously picking at a worn and bitten fingernail.  Miss Allister glanced at the black window to the door's left, table beneath it void of any candles, and shuddered, once.

      "So, what exactly's got you calling all the way to the B.P.R.D.?" he asked, watching stoically as she looked away from the window but not to him.  "Do you have any idea what's haunting you?"

      She continued to pick, anxious and fumbling, at her nails, steadfastly gazing at a spot some three feet to his right, and only at the gold-traced flow of the floor.  "A ghost," she said, after a quiet moment.  "Just a little one – a boy.  He's not very old, not at all, but he isn't _right_."  Her throat tightened and relaxed as she swallowed reflexively.

      "'Right,' ma'am?" he echoed, neutral.  "Looks unusual?  Changes shape, anything else that seems out of the ordinary?"

      In another circumstance it might have been amusing: a demon with a blatantly oversized right hand and a paranoid woman discussing a ghost, and whether said ghost was 'normal' or not.

      Touching fingers to her palm, Miss Allister pulled her hands apart from one another and shook her head, a universal 'no.'  "He looks just like any other little boy of his age," she answered.  Again she looked to that terrible black window, as if drawn relentlessly to it.  "Smaller than most, perhaps," she continued softly, "but no different than the other boys.  Except, of course, that he is dead and will not give me peace."

      Hellboy, having turned to study an old and frayed portrait of some long-dead Allister as he listened, shifted to face her again.  "Miss Allister," he said dryly, "you wanna tell me what it is you're really upset about here?"

      A frantic silence followed; one beat, now two, as she blinked, rooted with her wide-eyed, empty surprise, fingers curling in along the door at her back.  Enough time, then, for Hellboy to reconsider his blunt query, briefly, in thoughts of having maybe crossed a taboo line.  Damn, he thought.

      Instead of being affronted, though, she slowly relaxed her hands and spoke again.  "He is my son," she managed, features blank once more.  "He died a year ago, when he was seven; everyone was rather sick that fall, but Stephen felt it more harshly than anyone else."  Her fingers tightened, as, momentarily, did her throat.  "But I understand why the Lord took him, and I'm at peace, now – and he still will not leave me."

      Two more beats of silence, and Hellboy grunted, once, in sympathy or, more likely, focused thought.  "Damn," he finally responded.  "So, he only comes at night?"

      Miss Allister nodded, twisting her hands and stepping from the front door.  "Only when it is dark," she furthered.  "Never at day or when it is light.  I've lit all my candles; if it is not dark, he will not come.  I wished for you to have a night of sleep before," she hesitated, and broke off completely.

      "What about the window?" Hellboy pointed to the dark glass with his thumb, as noncommittally direct as ever.

      "No," she said shortly.  "I stay away from that window, as does he."

      He looked closer at the window, distant candlelight threading edges of yellow against the shadowed glass, and though he narrowed his eyes, turned away. 

      "Here," said Miss Allister abruptly, in a civil tone, "I'll take you to your room."

-

      The room she led him to was, thankfully enough, set on the first floor; he had little faith in the strength of the floorboards overhead, and was more than a bit suspicious that it would have taken some time fitting his bulk up the stairs anyway.  Squeezing through the narrow hallways was no breeze, in its own right, but was generally more comfortable than treading carefully to keep from snapping steps.

      Still, Hellboy granted the slender bed a dubious snort, sleep downstairs came with its own price.  That same room was a discomfortingly small one, little more than a floral-papered holding cell.  Albeit, of course, a holding cell with a freshly blue nightstand beneath the one window, and a bad he thought might snap in half if he even touched it.  The single wide candle on the table flickered mournfully, warping mundane shadows into vaguely unpleasant shapes.

      He wasn't particularly impressed by any of it.

      Gingerly resting his stone right hand on the meticulously tucked bedspread, a slight wooden groaning replied as the mattress gave dangerously.  "Huh," he muttered, and withdrew his hand.  "Didn't think I'd be sleeping anyway."

      He glanced to the window, blue flower-patterned drapes pulled across it, and gently pushing the cloth aside, peered out into the blackened English countryside.  Some glimmer of white trickled by among the softly lolling hills, too distant to be seen clearly as a boy or even a lost sheep.  It would, he reflected, be just his luck if this whole damn thing was because of a sheep wandering around in the supposed wilds.

      Dropping his flesh hand and looking to the nightstand, Hellboy grasped the oversized metal candleholder in his own large left hand, and with the candle as light moved quietly to the door.  An easy enough task – two small steps in _this _tiny room – and taking care to not snap off the doorknob in his concrete right grip, he opened the door as gently as was possible.

      In the hallway his candle was of little difference; Miss Allister, before returning timidly upstairs in her (far more spacious) room, had left them still burning, thin trails of smoke dissipating in the glow.  One or two had burnt out, wax rolled down in pearled trails, or blown out by a now dead air current.  The light persisted, though, still flickering out a gilded atmosphere onto glazed mahogany and smooth, flawless white walls, catching on the dark lines where the planks were wedged together.

      He paused, listening for any telltale creaks or shifting springs above to mark some restlessness on Miss Allister's part, and hearing nothing, he turned to the table topped with candles nearest him.  His unfeeling stone hand muffled and deadened the bright, tiny flames, pressing lightly into heated wax and unintentionally molding it even with his most careful grip.  To the next slender table's collection of candles he did the same, tall and stubby lights alike snuffed out with rocky fingertips and a broad palm.

      With each table's casting into sudden and dark night, the light from his temporary bedroom's single candle grew more profound, or in the least more necessary; for all his many unnatural (and un-human) strengths, Hellboy was as susceptible to nighttime blindness as any man.  Besides, keeping this candle alight until he'd set out the other candles downstairs gave him at least some semblance of control over the situation.

      "Only likes the dark," he muttered, half-ducking into an awkwardly small washroom to snuff out the few candles painstakingly arranged within.  "Never heard of a kid like that."

      He circumvented the whole of the ground floor, pressing each wick until the yellow, or red, or orange twisting eerie in the shadows, had been extinguished.  Gold vanished from wood, and each room and hallway darkened 'til now he was at the window to the right of the front door.  The asymmetrical trio of candles was as easily set out as the others, finishing the snuffing of all the candles but his.  Turning his attention to the locks at the door, he only had to take care to not be too rough in his handling of the twists and pulls, and then all that was left was his candle and turning the doorknob.

      Out beyond the window, when he leaned to it, a fog had quickly rolled out across the hills and road, misty and pale to obscure shapes and shadows in the ethereal wetness.  Again, in the vague and moonlight-less distance, Hellboy saw a flash of indistinct white, now closer and more formed, still wandering solemnly about.  He'd place money on it not being a sheep.

      "Well," he said to the window, "let's get this over with."

      Setting his right hand over the last candle on the first floor, he set the metal holder down and jerked the door open to the night and the fog that had pulled loose and cold along the ground.

      Now the fog turned upon itself, roiling slowly back in a thin mist that stretched, just as slowly, up along the empty space where the door had barred it.  The slow and calculated shift of the pale fog moved as if to cover an unseen barrier remaining where the door had been; through the fog the countryside was made vague, until even the shadows were glazed with the misty grayness, an intangible and moving wall to fit flatly into the white doorframe.

      "Swell," he grated, reaching quickly into a large, heavily weighted pocket in his overcoat.  "I hate it when they start showing off."  Drawing a dangling, gleaming rosary from the pocket, he wound the smoothly beaded neck of it around the fingers of his left hand and gripping the cross firmly in his palm, thrust his flesh fist through the insubstantial wall.

      At his movement the fog recoiled, twisting and trailing off into thin, momentary wisps that faded quickly in the night.  Sliding down, submissive and cold, it resettled close to the ground, clinging moistly to stone and earth as it subsided from the doorway and the rough fist jutting outward into that night, red in black.

      "You don't like crosses, either," he murmured, dropping his fist and taking a step back.  Looking out to the waiting, unmoving darkness, Hellboy began unwinding the rosary almost absently, letting the beads clack gently against one another.  He paused, then, glanced down to the cross still in his palm, and thinking better of it slowly started to wind the beads back across his fingers.

      A drop of water struck the back of his left hand.  "Got a leak?" he noted, as he dropped and fisted his left hand, twitching the rocky fingers of his right.  Tilting his head back – carefully, as the ceiling was only a few inches from his scalp –  he caught another falling water drop, splattering on the bridge of his nose coldly.  "Big leak," he amended.

      A chill and coalescing sheen of water had filmed over the walls and floorboards both below and above, sliding and dripping like a slow, but gathering, rain.  Two drops became six as the puddles began quickly forming around his heavy hooves, and Hellboy touched his right hand to the ceiling, not feeling texture or temperature but seeing the water flow to the rocky fingers as if his hand had now become a focal point.  He grimaced at the clear glimmering on that hand and promptly shook it.

      Droplets fell from his hand with soft plopping noises, passing effortlessly through the white specter of a boy silently stepping through the empty doorway, pale feet catching on and passing through the frame.

      "Jeez!" Hellboy hissed, starting.  Reflexively, preparing, he tightened his grip on the rosary, knuckles taut and fist ready to be lifted.  "Where the hell did you come from?"

      The boy did not turn, but continued walking, an odd, wandering pace as though it – he – was not entirely sure of where, exactly, he was.  At his feet, as he took small steps forward, the fog came trickling in as a bulging and effortlessly changing stream, neither touching Hellboy nor the pale and melancholy boy.

      "Hey," started Hellboy, turning to deliberately set a hoof in the fog and catch the boy.

      "Oh," said the boy, surprised, and he shifted to face the enormous red man.  He – the boy – scrubbed a hand over his colorless eyes, not noticing as several drops of water fell neatly through his tiny body.  "What," he asked slowly, in a distant and trembling voice, "are you doing here?"

      Hellboy snorted in reply, giving the small ghost a dry look.  "Kid," he retorted, "what the hell're _you_ doing here?"

      The boy looked up to him, bleached skin and ashen hair unmoving as he stared unblinkingly up.  Around his ankles the fog swirled, bubbling in waves and circlets in a slow climb up a tiny body preserved in an immortal ghostliness.

      "I can't sleep," he answered softly.  He turned, craning his neck as he tilted back his head to peer at the floorboards above, not needing or caring to blink as the indoor rain began falling swifter, a drop piercing his bleak and ghastly pupil.  

      "Mum left a door open," the boy said softly, pointing a small finger at the ceiling, to the room his mother had gone to.  His unfocused appearance wavered, then, somehow vaguer and more insubstantial than the moment before, and then he steadied, face clear if continually distant.

      Hellboy glanced at the door he had opened a few minutes prior, at the fog still creeping in with tendrils and cloying wet fingers, made a colder mist by the hurriedly dripping water.  "Different door," he said, slowly, narrowing his orange-gold eyes thoughtfully.  "There's some other entrance you're using."  He shifted his weight, moving to follow the ethereal boy – was he Stephen Allister's ghost? – as the child began walking calmly down the hallway, and water sloshed, puddle and rapidly deepening, around his hooves.  

      "Are you here to help Mum?" the boy asked, suddenly, with a keen clarity that had been missing.  He stopped, the water flowing through his immaterial booted foot, and once more looked to Hellboy, a sharp worry creasing the vagueness of his small features.

      "Yeah," Hellboy respond, rubbing his thumb gently along the cross warm against his palm.  "I'm helping your mom out, kid."

      The boy – Stephen – nodded seriously, wavering pale in the fog and unnatural rain, not touched by or touching any of it.  "Good," he said, solemnly, and frowned as the glazing obscurity flickered over his face again.  "Will you close the door, then?" he asked faintly, clarity fading into serene, saddened blankness.  "I don't know how to and Mum can't see it.  You could, though – couldn't you?"

      Stephen's look was distant and unassuming, and Hellboy glanced sharply at him.  "Kid, what's this door doing to you anyway?"

      "My bed is wet," was the answer, slow and thoughtful.  "When she cries, I can't sleep, and she cries every night.  Will you tell her that?"

      Hellboy looked to the boy, and opening his mouth to make a gruffly supportive remark, paused.  "Aw, jeez," he muttered and swore under his breath.

      A soft sound – springs bunching and releasing beneath a shifting, light mass – and then, distinctly overhead, that same weight settling cautiously on the floorboards.  A moment passed, as if Miss Allister had paused to stretch, followed by steady, quiet footsteps moving away towards the stairs.

      "Damn!" Hellboy whispered, gritting.  "Why can't you stay in bed?"  Tightening his grip on the rosary, he shrugged impatiently under the quickening fall of water and began grimly slogging after Stephen.  "Kid, you're going to have to deal with your wet bed," he started, lifting his fisted left hand and uncurling fingers to let the cross dangle, delicate and warning.

      "Will she hate me?" the boy asked, quiet.  He tilted his head to one side, gazing in dim consideration up at the imposing red figure as the footsteps descended, hurrying and panicked, down the steps.  "She doesn't know the door is open, and I know she doesn't want me here."

      Hellboy hesitated, narrowing his eyes and setting his square jaw, the cross dangling unnoticed by Stephen over his thin and quivering shoulder.  "Kid," he exhaled, and broke off, turning to face the horrified and motionless figure of Miss Allister at the end of the hallway.  Water heaved and splashed around his ankles, and Stephen smiled absently up to him, eerily kind.

      "Oh," she said, fingers scrabbling unconsciously, frantically at the slick walls.  "Oh, God.  Oh, God, how could you set my candles out?  Now it's dark, and, oh, God!"  She stared at Stephen, her face slack and terrified, hair and nightgown quickly growing soaked beneath the falling water, silver and bright and still dark; her face twisted, sharp and despairingly ugly in the movement, and she stumbled backwards, sliding into the water with a soft, cruel splash.

      "She hates me now," Stephen whispered.  His pale face shone, weakly broken as it gleamed white, and he kept his bleached eyes on the intimidating form of Hellboy.  "She's crying again," he said wistfully.  "And my bed is already wet."  Now he looked away, staring gently at the hunched form of his mother.

      "Ma'am," said Hellboy, lifting his voice patiently, but feeling generally annoyed by the way things had started to head, "you need to get out of here.  I'm trying to take care of this, and it'd be easier if you weren't here."  He took a step forward and lowered the cross, only to have the polished silver pass harmlessly through the ghostly skin and bone of Stephen's shoulder.  Miss Allister muffled a whimper, curled against the wall as the water swirled around her, and Hellboy simply pulled his hand back, swiftly unwinding the rosary and digging back through his overcoat's pocket.  "Alright," he said, "maybe crosses don't do anything after all."

      "Why aren't you looking for the door?" asked Stephen, curious, eyes eerie and lifeless, with the strange reflection of the black window in his glowing face.

      Hellboy paused, and then swung around to look into the darkness where that window was before turning back to Stephen.

      "Ma'am," he began carefully, not looking away from the passive, reflective face that was Stephen's, "when'd you get that window?"  The rosary swung, light and methodical, in the hard grip of his right hand, polished beads slick with moisture and gently clicking a timed rhythm that pressed against the back of his mind.  A tempo, and unvoiced countdown, and he needed her answer _right now_.  "That window," he pointed, left hand to the left window, bereft of even candle stubs.  "When did you get it?"

      "Now you see it," Stephen said, pleased.  The vagueness cleared from his face again as the fog twisted back, a hovering mist above the rising water.  "You can close the door for me and Mum."  He smiled, sweetly, and bent to grasp the fog in his small hands, somehow lifting it with his insubstantial grip and painstakingly wrapping himself in it, as though the fog was a shroud to be worn in the grave.  "Would you tell him when you had the window done, Mum?" he asked, turning that sweet, dead smile on his mother where she sat, trembling.

      Silence came, disturbed only by the swift dripping of water from the ceiling, the walls, and even the soaked, heavy fabric of Hellboy's overcoat.

      "A month after Stephen died," Miss Allister said, finally, in a weak voice.  She stared, afraid, at them both, terrified by the gleam of red in the shadows, and more so by the bright specter of her son.  "I, uh, broke the original window," she swallowed, placing a hand gingerly on the flowing wall, "the – that day."  She did not add more, and instead looked to the floor, shivering as she struggled to stand, nightgown soaked and steadily dripping.

      Hellboy made a general thinking noise, glancing at the black window lit only by the unearthly ripple of light that came from the boy.  "Figures," he grunted.

      "It's warped, this window – the glass doesn't fit rightly, but," she stumbled on her words, huddling miserably beside the wall as the water dipped and swirled over her bare feet.  "But I can't bring myself to go near it," she finished quietly, flushing almost unnoticeably in the inky darkness.  "I shake and feel so ill I think I'd die."

      "Wow," Hellboy replied, dryly, "that's great.  You buy it from any weird guys?  Stiff accents, occult symbols on clothes – tattoos, jewelry?"

      "No," she answered, looking momentarily bemused and brushing wet hair from her eyes.  "No, just from a small shop in town.  Albert's been a friend of the family for years."

      "Mm-hmm," he responded absently, tucking the rosary's looping neck over the broad fingers of his right hand.  "Still, your kid's saying it's some kind of door.  Says you left it open and I'm going to have to close it."  He paused, touching the cross and holding it tentatively between stony forefinger and thumb.  "Sounds easy enough."

      Stephen seemed to agree, rocking noiselessly on his heels and smiling with a quiet sort of joy.  "Oh, it should be," he said brightly, the last trace of obscurity fading. "You can close the door."

      "I got it, kid," Hellboy reminded him.

      Slipping through the water, he found – somewhat to his surprise – that there was no underlying current, no invisible wall or sudden angry spirit to stop or slow his progress.  With the soft, pulsing glow of Stephen casting a slightly disquieting paleness to the night, he ducked around the still-open front door to stand before the window.

      It was just glass: rippled, distorted, and even in the moon-less night it was obvious the window was tinted darker than the others.  But it was still just glass, and he raised his brow skeptically at it.  He felt no illness and sure as hell didn't feel as if he was going to die, but then again he wasn't entirely the same as either Miss Allister or Stephen; he did lean closer, though, to peer into, or through, the glass at the English countryside.

      Somewhere in the distance, seen warped through the glass, he spotted several white _things_, sheep that were ghosts wandering slowly closer among the subtle hills.  "Jeez!" he noted, and broke the window with his right fist, scrapped the ragged glass from the casing as he pulled his hand back, the rosary dangling, whole, in his grip.

      Stephen had vanished silently when he turned around, taking the fog and twisting light with him into his un-living sleep.  In the sudden, complete darkness, Hellboy fumbled to find the light switch, slogging awkwardly through the placid water the ghost boy had left.  

      "Yeah," said Hellboy as Miss Allister squinted in the electric brightness.  "You'll have to replace the window again.  Might need a mop, too."

      The water began to pour into the night, the walls and ceiling no longer dripping with an unnatural rainfall.

-

_end_


End file.
